Today's links

• Refining humanity: What our technology is shows us what we're not.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: GNU Radio; France v "follow us on Twitter"; Aaronsw vindicated; Capitalism's crooked refs.
• Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Refining humanity (permalink)

One of the best ways to evaluate your own understanding of a subject is to attempt to explain it to someone else. Through explaining things, we discover how much of the "totally obvious" world is actually full of ambiguity, mystery and contradiction.

There's a great bit in Rowan Atkinson's historical sitcom Blackadder that illustrates this principle. In "Ink and Incapability" Blackadder and friends have accidentally burned the only copy of Samuel Johnson's original dictionary of the English language. To cover up their mistake, they decide that they will recreate the dictionary themselves. However, they founder on the first word they try to define, "A":

Blackadder: Let's start at the beginning, shall we? First: 'A.' How would you define 'A'?

Prince George: Ohh…'A' (continues this in background). Oh, I love this! I love this! Quizzies! Erm, hang on, it’s coming. Ooh, crikey, erm, oh yes, I’ve got it!

B: What?

PG: Well, it doesn’t really mean anything, does it?

B: Good. So we're well on the way, then. "'A'; impersonal pronoun; doesn't really mean anything."

I mean, what does "A" mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has more than a dozen definitions, and just the first one runs to more than 1,500 words:

https://archive.org/details/the-oxford-english-dictionary-all-volumes_202208/The%20Oxford%20English%20Dictionary%20Volume%201%20-%20A%20to%20B/page/n25/mode/2up

Now, normal life involves a lot of explaining things to other people. You have to explain your problems to customer service reps, who have to explain why they can't solve those problems to you. You need to explain to your loved ones why you want to leave your toothbrush in the shower, and they have to explain why they hate having your toothbrush in the shower. These explanation-exchanges teach you as much as they teach the person you're locked in dialog with. The reasons for leaving your toothbrush in the shower may seem totally obvious to you, and your partner's inability to understand this reveals the assumptions you've never even considered.

For the past four decades, an increasing proportion of the population have spent an increasing proportion of their lives explaining things to machines that have no assumptions or shared context: computers. What we call "programming a computer" is really "breaking down a thing that seems obvious to you into increasingly simple instructions that will be followed to the letter."

Computers are like the genies of legend, bloody-minded literalists who will do exactly what you say, in the way that is perversely furthest from what you mean. To get a computer to do anything, you must first understand it to a degree that far exceeds the understanding needed to explain something to any other human, even a small child.

To take just one example: yesterday, I was on a plane, and the seatback video started cycling through its video-on-demand offerings. All of the movie titles that began with "the" were rewritten to put "the" at the end of the title (for example, "The Sting" was written as "Sting, The"). It's obvious why the system's designer had done this: we expect to find movies whose titles begin with "The" alphabetized under their second word ("The Sting" should appear between "Star Wars" and "Story of a Love Affair"; not between "The Godfather" and "The Untouchables").

I remember when I learned this from my elementary school's teacher-librarian, when I was seven and my class got a tutorial on the school library's card catalog. The librarian explained this principle to us in a matter of minutes, as part of a longer set of instructions, and still, it stuck with me forever.

But here we are, 48 years later, and we still haven't standardized a way to get computers to grasp this foundational principle of alphabetization. Many different databases handle this, to be sure, but it's so inconsistent across so many platforms that someone at the head-end of the video distribution system that feeds American Airlines' VOD system decided, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the 'The' at the end of these titles."

Computers are stupid, in other words, which means that the people who program them have to have smarts enough for both of them. Unfortunately for our entire species and civilization, the software industry has historically valued skill at writing efficient and reliable software over writing software that adequately reflects reality. There is an entire genre of lists that illustrate the problem with this; the "falsehoods programmers believe" lists:

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

From "names of people" and "street addresses"; from "prices" to "time"; from "email addresses" to "phone numbers"; the "awesome falsehoods" lists are awesome because they reveal how much subtlety and complexity is lurking in these seemingly simple and intuitive concepts. This subtlety and complexity might never emerge through the process of trying to teach a person about them, but when you try to teach a computer about them, you have to confront them in all their awesome fuggliness.

That's because humans have context, agency and flexibility. Sure, the person who designs a form with a blank for "name" might never have met a Malagasy person whose first name is Randriamananjararadofabesata, but in the pre-digital world, when Madagascar Slim met a public official who had to transcribe his name onto a paper form, that official could simply draw an arrow in the margin next to the "name" blank, turn the form over, and write out all 28 characters on the reverse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Slim

Computers can't do this. If the programmer doesn't know about Malagasy first names, the computer doesn't know about them either, and the only person who can "teach" the computer about these names is a programmer with access to the code for the database, who has to manually alter the code, compile it, and distribute it to everyone who uses it.

This is partly why digitization has been accompanied by a rise in people asserting that they exist on spectrums rather than in binaries. There were always people whose names, genders, races, and other biographic "immutables" changed, or failed to fit within the blanks on the forms. When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

Getting a human official to turn the paper over and write something that didn't fit in the blank is a personal challenge. It requires that a subject convince the person who controls the form to make an exception. This isn't always easy, but officials on the front lines necessarily deal with reality, and they can't get their jobs done unless they're capable of interpreting the necessarily incomplete procedures they operate under to fit things as they really are.

But a computer doesn't have any agency or context or flexibility. If the computer says your name isn't valid, you can't argue the computer into accepting it. The only way to get a digital world to acknowledge your existence is to campaign for systemic change. A trans person might (with great difficulty, to be sure) convince the regional registrar to white-out an old X on one "gender" box and mark a new X in the other box. But the only way to make that change in a software system that has been programmed to treat the "gender" field as immutable is to change society itself.

In this way, computers are machines for teaching us what we don't know about ourselves. They require that we interrogate and faithfully recreate our personal tacit knowledge, and they require that our societies interrogate their tacit presumptions as well. When you are forced to turn your tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, you're also forced to confront how many broken assumptions lurk inside your reasoning. At best, it's a clarifying process.

Computers don't just clarify what we know and how we organize our society: they also clarify what we are. There are lots of things that we have supposed that a computer would never do, because we believed that these things required something that only humans could do.

Take chess: there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, so brute-forcing chess by running all possible games is a technological impossibility. The best human chess players do something we don't quite understand, mixing their recollections of previous games with rules-of-thumb about the best strategies, with "creativity" (whatever that is) that lets them spontaneously develop new strategies. We can easily get a computer to memorize all the known-good chess sequences and all the rules of thumb, but we don't know what "creativity" is, so we can't encode it as a series of instructions.

But thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning and its successor, "deep learning," we have created chess-playing software that can beat every human, partly by assaying gambits that we would term "creative" if they originated with a human player.

What we make of this new fact is controversial. For many people (myself included), this is a refinement: it tells me that behaviors that are indistinguishable from "creativity" can, at least some of the time, be created by mechanical processes, and the mere fact that a machine does something that appears "creative" doesn't mean that machines are human.

For others, the fact that a mechanical system can evince a behavior that we would call "creative" in a human doesn't mean that we defined "creativity" too broadly, it means that we defined "human" too narrowly, and now we have made a machine that is, at least partially, a person.

I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw, for reasons that Ted Chiang sets out with luminous brilliance in a recent Atlantic article entitled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious":

https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/

(If you're hitting the paywall on that one and you're on Firefox, you can try my favorite trick: switch to "Reader Mode" and hit "reload" – your mileage may vary.)

For all the reasons Chiang articulates, I think that drawing the "personhood" line to include machines is a technical mistake, but it's worse than that. Admitting machines to the "personhood" club is a tactical mistake, on par with the mistake we made when we admitted corporations to the personhood club. We should absolutely consider expanding personhood to incorporate living things, including animals and ecosystems, but at the same time, we must purge these dead, artificial constructs from the club:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

There is a way in which the recognition of new capabilities in machines parallels the recognition of new capabilities in animals other than ourselves. When those animals manage to do things that we once thought were the exclusive province of humans, we (should) take that as an opportunity to refine our conception of humanity. We're not "the animals that use tools" or "the animals that make plans" or "the animals that recognize themselves in mirrors," because there are other animals that do those things. We are an "animal that uses tools"; not the animal that does so.

Likewise, if we thought that some activity was unique to humans, or to living beings, and we manage to get a machine to replicate that activity, we should revise our view of the activity – not our view of the machine. Creative breakthroughs in chess are not "a thing that requires a human mind," they're "things that can be done by human minds and by machines."

Edsger Dijkstra once famously asked "can a submarine swim?"

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html

Submarines and fish and humans and dolphins all propel themselves through water by different means. But when an animal swims, it does something that is different from what a submarine does. The submarine has no intention, while (complex multicellular) animals swim to pursue goals. Building machines that propel themselves through water is very useful, but it's not the same thing as creating life. In some ways, it's better than creating life: for one thing, we owe other living things moral consideration that is not due to machines. Harnessing a machine to accomplish our own goals is more morally clear than controlling living things to achieve those goals. By the same token, creating machines that can do some of the tasks that we ask of other humans can be the superior moral course. I'd rather have a machine remove mines from a minefield than getting humans to do it.

But beyond this moral relief, creating machines is a fantastic way to learn more about ourselves – making explicit our tacit knowledge, our implicit social assumptions, and the limitations of our conception of what sets us apart from the rest of the universe.

One way in which AI is exceptional is in how it undermines this principle. Conventional software techniques struggled to produce a program that could identify objects in photographs. It turns out that defining all the visual correlates of "cat" is even harder than defining the letter "A." Deep learning techniques solved this previous insoluble problem by relieving us of the job of making explicit all the implicit factors that we deploy when distinguishing an image of a "cat" from an image of a "dog" or a "tiger" (or a "tractor").

Instead of forcing humans to engage in introspection until we'd made a list of every factor we use to identify cat pictures, we simply identified pictures of cats and fed them to a program that tried to find the commonalities among them. The more pictures we fed to that program, the better it got at identifying cats. Today, we have programs that can reliably distinguish an image of a cat from an image of a tiger cub!

This represents a major breakthrough in the power of computers to perform useful work for us, but it's also a huge regression in computers' role in forcing us to make our tacit thought processes explicit through systematic introspection. That's probably fine: we didn't create computers to make us introspect, we created them to do useful work for us. All things considered, it might be better to have genies who grant our wishes according to the spirit of our words, not their letter.

AI may not force us to render our implicit thoughts as explicit instructions, but it absolutely forces us to reconsider and narrow the realm of the numinous. Our own creativity is still delightful and important, but the fact that this squishy, amazing process can (sometimes) be replicated by procedural machines changes the definition of living things. We're "a thing that can produce creative outcomes" but not "the things that can produce creative outcomes." The machines aren't being creative (any more than a submarine is swimming) but they're outputting things that we used to only achieve by means of creativity.

An AI that does something that used to require creativity is fulfilling my favorite of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has not done before":

https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

Just as bosses fantasize about AI bringing about a worksite without workers, and Zuckerberg is trying to build social media without socializing, and politicians want a bureaucracy without bureaucrats, we can sometimes use AI to produce creative outcomes without creativity:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb

That isn't to say that AI art is any good. AI may produce things that are aesthetically interesting, but it can't produce things that mean anything:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/02/must-we-pretend/

But art isn't the only realm that we apply creativity to. There are plenty of outcomes that we've always believed we couldn't bring about without applying creativity. AI – like all software – is making us realize that an ingredient we once deemed uniquely essential turns out to have substitutes. AI can sometimes accomplish things without us explaining how we do them. That relieves us of a useful but difficult chore – but in so doing, it forces us (yet again!) to revisit what sorts of things are needed to do the things that matter to us, and therefore, what makes us special.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• EU plots long game against US digital supremacy https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-plots-long-game-against-us-digital-supremacy/

• Open World Map: Digital Sovereignty for Game Creators https://luma.com/8nvmyatm

• Enshittifier — replace AI with https://enshittifier.wells.ee/

• AI is the greatest money-wasting scheme humanity has ever invented https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_tw_post_scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

• Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet https://www.liberalism.org/p/enshittification-despotification-and-the-open-internet

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago GNU Radio: the universal, software-defined radio https://web.archive.org/web/20060613062355/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70933-0.html

#15yrsago France bans “follow us on Twitter” from newscasts https://web.archive.org/web/20110606035424/http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/france-bans-facebook-and-twitter-from-radio-and-tv/1559

#5yrsago Aaron Swartz, vindicated https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#cfaa

#5yrsago Capitalism's crooked refs https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#crooked-ref

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus)
  https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035

• Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP)
  https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

• The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
  https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, “no-tech” tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers?

Alberta’s Ursa Ag says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. We have for years covered the frustration that farmers have felt as they have been locked out of their Deere tractors with digital rights management systems that prevent them from fixing their machinery, tractors that won’t run because of minor sensor failures, and crops that literally die on the vine as they wait for an “authorized” repair person to fix tractors during critical harvesting periods. 

Ursa Ag markets its tractors as “no frills” and “built to last.” Ursa Ag’s Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn’t loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and Framework, which makes modular, repairable laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair monopolies and the injection of technology and internet-connected sensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets. 

“I talk to farmers every day and I hear from farmers every day about how they went out and bought machinery from 1987 so that it wouldn’t have a computer on it,” Wilson said. “All of this came from a simple discussion with a customer who wanted to be able to turn [the tractor] on at the start of the day, to use it, and shut it off at the end of the day. It needed to work, so that’s what we built.”

Ursa Ag’s tractor has been hyped in agriculture circles after Wilson showed the tractor off at a Canadian farm show and it was featured by Farms.com. Wilson said more than a thousand farmers have contacted him after that show, from roughly 30 countries. “I got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn’t own a computer and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors,” he said. 

He said the company has thus far made a couple fewer than 100 tractors but is working on tripling its production capacity and has seen a lot of demand over the last few months. For years, people who don’t understand the repair monopoly issue—that John Deere controls the parts production and distribution for its tractors, the software that runs its tractors, the diagnostics for its tractors, and the repair guides for its tractors—have said that farmers should simply vote with their wallets and buy tractors from a different company. The problem has been that, until now, there hasn’t really been an alternative company that doesn’t have similar repair practices. Ursa Ag is filling that niche. Perhaps other companies will pop up to sell low- or no-tech, repairable appliances and gadgets.

“Given the number of my customers that carry flip phones, I would say there is consumer pressure to back away from some of the technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks,” Wilson said. “So that is definitely transferable to dishwashers and washing machines, refrigerators. Refrigerators that have screens on them that'll tell you what's inside. It's a little crazy.”

“That high-tech stuff, the million-dollar John Deere tractor has a place. It has technology that is well worth the money,” Wilson said. “But that technology is needed for 5 percent of what a farm does. There are so many applications for tractors on farms that don’t require technology. The technology that goes into even a calculator is not required for most farming applications.” 

A year and a half-ish into Donald Trump's second term as the nation's foremost disgrace, we now have a clear picture into what the ailing narcissist believes the United States government was built for. It isn't complex; even running down a partial list of departments and agencies will reveal it soon enough.

• Trump believes the purpose of the Department of Justice is to manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of the FBI is to manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of the FCC is to manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of the Federal Housing Finance Agency is to manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the chairmanship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exists to manufactures scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of ICE and DHS are to act as props for manufactured scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of the IRS is to cover up tax evasion by his allies while manufacturing scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence exists to, of course, manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the State Department exists to serve a stable of ambassadors who will go out and manufacture foreign scandals against his enemies (and also facilitate family real estate deals.)

We've all been marveling at the cabinet-level chaos that has seen the duties of State transferred to the "Department of War," or the seeming indifference of the FBI head to that whole solving crimes part, or the unclear chain of command in both civilian law enforcement and military engagements that appears to boil down to "Stephen Miller is in charge of anything he wants to be in charge of," but it makes much more sense when you realize that Donald Trump himself does not know or care what any of these agencies do, because after five nonconsecutive years of running the whole executive branch he has at no point been able to conceive of any of them as anything more than arbitrary fiefdoms to which he can assign pre-humiliated bootlickers to shower him with praise while manufacturing scandals against his enemies.

They're all the same job. That's why Trump can announce, with perfect seriousness, that the new Director of National Intelligence is the guy who spends his days searching through the files at the Federal Housing Financing Agency to see whether anyone on Trump's enemies list might have a mortgage issue that can be scandalized—and that since heading the FHFA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the coordination of 18-ish U.S. intelligence agencies are all mere part time jobs at best, the mortgage guy can head up national intelligence efforts in his spare time.

It's all the same crap, after all.

President Donald Trump has named Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, succeeding Tulsi Gabbard who recently announced she plans to resign from the role at the end of June.

Pulte, a close Trump ally who serves as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has “deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, a substantial increase from where it was just 12 months ago,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post Tuesday morning.

While he serves as acting director of national intelligence, Pulte will remain as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency as well as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Trump wrote. [...]

In his role leading the agency, Pulte has targeted Democrats whom Trump perceives as his political enemies. In March, Pulte made two criminal referrals against New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging insurance fraud, several months after Trump’s Justice Department failed to prosecute her for a third time. James’ lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, called the allegations “baseless.”

To you, a person who thinks that preventing international terrorism might be a full time position, maybe even a more-than-full-time position, like working for one of those tech companies that expects you to work 16 hour days and sleep under your desk. The sort of job that you have to pack a toothbrush for.

Alternatively, you might at least think that the person tapped to coordinate intelligence gathering across the whole of federal government ought to have some prior experience in working with federal intelligence agencies, not least because the goddamn law requires it.

But you are not Donald Trump, and what you need to understand is that Donald Trump does not give a flying shit whether America is attacked by terrorists. He has no interest whatsoever in preventing foreign states from sabotaging massive chunks of the U.S. electrical grid, or injecting malware that causes a major U.S. pipeline to burst. He does not care even the tiniest little bit whether state-sponsored hackers in Russia, China, Iran, or anywhere else fund themselves with ransomware attacks on U.S. companies.

He doesn't care and you can't make him care, because after five point five years of being in charge of all of this, with full access to as many tutors and experts as the whole of the U.S. government can produce, this delusional malignant narcissist still cannot understand government as anything but a vehicle for glorifying his own supposed greatness while manufacturing scandals against his enemies.

Trump doesn't want Bill Pulte to become Director of National Intelligence because he thinks Pulte knows a damn thing about intelligence, terrorism, espionage, or sabotage. Pulte is, objectively, a raving idiot whose sole qualification as a Trump appointee is being the rich-as-sin son of a sketchy-as-sin homebuilding magnate, a vastly creepy critter who shares Trump's affinity for scamming family members.

Pulte is, if anything, a reminder that if you're delusional and poor America will shun you, but if you're even more delusional and have a rich dad then some other delusional freak who had a rich dad will invariably assign you a top government position.

the current director of national intelligence is a guy who two years ago received a trophy declaring he “Fucks Only The Young” at an (oddly dildo focused) event he organized dedicated to the conspiracy that Bed Bath and Beyond never actually went bankrupt

paris martineau (@paris.nyc)

the current director of national intelligence is a guy who two years ago received a trophy declaring he “Fucks Only The Young” at an (oddly dildo focused) event he organized dedicated to the conspiracy that Bed Bath and Beyond never actually went bankrupt [contains quote post or other embedded content]

Bluesky Socialparis martineau

another fun fact is that Pulte used to host meetups for fellow memestock fans and went through a period where he unironically wore a "bulletproof vest" to bars because he was concerned his Enemies would Stop Him

paris martineau (@paris.nyc)

another fun fact is that Pulte used to host meetups for fellow memestock fans and went through a period where he unironically wore a “bulletproof vest” to bars because he was concerned his Enemies would Stop Him

Bluesky Socialparis martineau

The extent of Pulte's prior government experience can be measured solely by whether or not he ever managed to wander into one of the curtained-off corners of Mar-a-Lago that Trump insists count as popup SCIFs. But Pulte isn't expected to coordinate intelligence across government agencies to begin with; Trump doesn't give a flying damn what happens to or with the intelligence. Trump nominated Pulte to the position so that Pulte would be in a position to thumb through national security secrets the same way he's thumbed through mortgage records.

Trump considers the weaponization of federal agencies to be the only job any of his various toadies can be judged on, and Pulte has proven a willingness to weaponize even the most boring agency and put forward even the stupidest of supposed conspiracies.

Will Iranian-linked terrorists pull off a major attack on U.S. soil under Donald Trump's watch? We won't know unless it happens. But if you're looking to expose a good chunk of the American espionage apparatus in a fevered effort to tie any random Democratic senator to a confusingly dildo-riddled conspiracy to trick Americans into thinking Bed Bath and Beyond had gone bankrupt, this real estate failson is your guy.

Trump doesn't care. That's what we all need to internalize here. It's not that Trump is sabotaging the economy, the military, intelligence agencies, scientific research, medical research, public health in general, food supplies, fuel supplies, and every U.S. agency you can name because he has some vision for how America should operate either now or after he's gone. He doesn't give the slightest shit. For all he cares, the United States might as well cease to exist if it's not going to exist as a tacky gilded monument to him and him alone.

As with the $1.8 billion proposed slush fund for Trump-allied violent felons, there is a good chance that Pulte may not be long for the job. Senate Republicans still recovering from the previous Obvious Fking Crime are reeling from Trump's new announcement, and for the same reasons: These Republicans have staked their entire careers on being the tough-on-crime tough-on-terrorists lets-bomb-everybody daddy party, and nominating an obvious hack fresh off the Dildo & Memestock World Tour to be the new DNI after Tulsi Gabbard already made a wreck of the office might be too much for some senators.

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)

RAJU: Do you think Bill Pulte has experience to be acting DNI? THUNE: I’ll defer to Chairman Cotton COTTON: We have 4 more weeks with Director Gabbard as the DNI RAJU: And Pulte? COTTON: I have no observations on the matter

Bluesky SocialAaron Rupar

Meanwhile, Democratic senators are threatening to nix any new FISA deal if Pulte is installed. There's also a very good case to be made for impeaching Pulte right-the-hell-now, stripping him of the prior Senate confirmation that allows him to sail into the "acting" DNI role without new Senate approval.

So we'll see. Trump has used the DNI position as a dumping ground for hyperpartisan possibly-crooked cranks ranging from Gabbard to Rick Grenell; it has been obvious for nearly a decade that Trump sees the position as valuable solely as a way to wedge his most loyal of toadies into the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

And it's not a surprise anymore, because that is who Trump is. Trump has never, ever given a damn about terrorism, foreign espionage, or other threats to America. He truly and sincerely does not care, and you cannot make him care.

Watch any cabinet meeting and it becomes perfectly clear: Trump doesn't know what any of these agencies actually do. He only wants to know what each big-shoed bootlicker has been doing to glorify him and rout his infinitely many enemies, and if you take longer than ninety seconds to tell him there's a good chance he's going to fall asleep in his chair.

He is too stupid to ever learn, too mired in narcissism to ever care, and too fragile to ever change. So no: Given all of that, we are never going to convince the man to take international terrorism more seriously than he takes his own petty personal vendettas. And we will never, ever get him to agree that stuffing federal agencies with whichever random real estate dildo memestock failsons last wandered into his private Florida club is not, in the end, a viable system of government.

Just over three years ago, at the US Senate, Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) asked me for my three most important suggestions for AI legislation.

Number one on my list was preflight checks, similar to the FDA review for drugs, for models with large commercial impact:

Today, most definitely not on my bingo card, President Trump signed an executive order that was very much along on these lines:

I can’t take credit for causality, but it’s thrilling to see a dream come true.

May any such oversight be bipartisan, and in the interest of American citizens, and in the interests of humanity as a whole.

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Happy to see that my short story “Model Collapse” which originally appeared in Reactor Magazine was listed as a notable story in the 2026 edition Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Olivie Blake.…

In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout said, “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” So consider what’s happening in the minds of everyone who has long depended on Google to be what it has always been—a search engine for the Web—when they consider what they’re seeing from Google now, and reading in stories such as these:

• Google Search as You Know It is Over (TechCrunch)
• Google Shifts to AI Search, Heralding Major Change in How People Use the Internet (in Time)
• Is Google about to destroy the web? (BBC)
• The Death of Google Search (Impact Lab)
• Google Just Killed the Search Engine (in Banyan Hill)
• Google Has Abandoned What Made People Love Google (in How To Geek)

By forking itself away from search, Google is also forking over the Web—and creating a giant opening for somebody else to grab the Web Search position.

Who would that be? 

Microsoft’s Bing is one candidate, but Bing’s UI is a NASCAR of promotional jive. (See what Steve Jobs says about Microsoft here. Cuts like a scalpel.)

DuckDuckGo is the other. Its position is privacy. That’s good, but Web Search is better now, because the position is available. Google isn’t abandoning search, but now they’d rather be “your helpful assistant” and “personal shopper” than the Web’s “librarian.” (Source: Google Gemini.) To make that shift, Google has compromised Web search, and the Web with it.)

Conveniently, DuckDuckGo already has a search engine for the Web. They can sharpen that position while keeping—or even expanding —their privacy one. And help save the Web in the process.

They’re already on the case. See what they’re saying on Threads, BlueSky, Xitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

They should also add “Does pure Web search by default” and “No AI extension” to their list of things they do and Google doesn’t:

Anyway, glad to help.